No More Telemark Skiing -- The End of an Era

That's me tele-ing Guns and Roses on the backside of Discovery several years back. So long free heels.

On a Friday in early February, I forgot my boots on the way up to Snowbowl and so rented some equipment for the afternoon. I had been thinking about getting rid of my telemark gear for weeks (even years) and had been alpine skiing on my tele equipment for a while. The experience on some proper alpine gear convinced me that it was time to make to switch. So I bought myself some boots, grabbed some bindings off of an old pair of skis, had them put on my tele boards, and that was that, I was a tele skier no longer.

This may sound like no big deal, but it kind of is for me. I started telemarking back in the winter of 1992-93 as a freshman at Montana Tech. I was passionate about skiing from the start and remain so, but I always was proud of the fact that I was a telemarker, especially back in the 90's when that was the 'cool thing'. Over the years, I got to be pretty proficient on the teles, moving from leather boots to the modern, beefy plastic boots that are as stiff as an alpine boot.

I probably would never have given telemarking up, but my knees began to hurt me a few years back. I was able to ignore the pain for a while, as it wasn't so bad, but finally this year it began to impinge on the fun, and so I figured it was time. I've been glad to find that the move to alpine from telemarking is easy. Indeed, alpine skiing is significantly less strenuous and so I can enjoy a longer day, I feel like I can ski harder, and most importantly for me, it doesn't hurt.

Okay it hurts a little, but that's skiing for you. Where else can you ride 2500 feet down a mountain, weaving through trees and snow, in five minutes. (Oh yeah, mountain biking!) It's a feeling like few others. Anyway, I say good bye to telemark skiing, in the hopes that I'll be traveling to the hill in winter for decades to come.